Category: Media

The Hearing Protection Fearmongering Continues

The Hearing Protection Act should survive the Byrd Rule challenge it’s currently dealing with, in part because, as Cam noted on Wednesday, it deals with the tax portion specifically. Remove the tax, and there’s no reason to have a registry, which was just about knowing who paid the tax.

The National Firearms Act really revolves around taxes, not availability. The way those who passed the law saw it, it didn’t violate the Second Amendment because it didn’t tell anyone what they could and couldn’t have.

Yet now that suppressors are potentially being removed from the NFA, the usual suspects are losing their minds.

And they’re fearmongering like crazy about it, such as in this op-ed.

The budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for its sharp cuts to Medicaid. But what has largely escaped the public’s attention is the part of the bill that would aid mass shooters, terrorists, and assassins by deregulating gun silencers.

Silencers on guns make it harder for ordinary civilians and police to hear the sound, see the flash, and quickly detect the location of the shooter. Thus they can serve to facilitate mass shootings.

In Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 2019, a gunman who shot and killed twelve people used a silencer. At first, those present didn’t even know that a shooting was underway. Some of them began running but didn’t know which way to go because they hadn’t heard the gunfire.

I find it amusing that the author had to go back to 2019 to find a high-profile case involving a legally purchased suppressor.

First, Virginia Beach kind of proves that their inclusion on the NFA doesn’t stop bad actors from doing bad things with legally purchased suppressors if they decide to do so.

Second, this whole thing was written by someone who learned everything they know about suppressors from television or movies. A number of suppressors don’t even lower the sound of a shot enough to justify shooting without hearing protection in some cases, and none make those shots whisper quiet. Sure, people didn’t recognize the sounds at first in Virginia Beach, but part of that was simply because they didn’t realize what they were hearing in the first place.

I also notice that the author didn’t mention the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. His alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, allegedly used a 3D-printed suppressor that he didn’t purchase legally.

Unfortunately, legalizing silencers fits the pattern of Trump’s second term gun policy. He weakened the Brady background check system by revoking President Joe Biden’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Under it, the licenses of gun dealers could be cancelled if they failed to run background checks as required or sold guns to prohibited people. And Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would even allow “irresponsible and dangerous gun sellers who lost their licenses because of willful violations of the law to get back into business,” as the group Brady United put it. They can simply reapply.

And this is how you know this writer either doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about or is actively lying to his readers.

The policy didn’t somehow make it possible for licenses to be revoked for breaking the law. That’s always been on the table, as well as prosecution, should a licensed dealer fail to conduct a NICS check or knowingly sell a gun to a prohibited person. That’s still something dealers face should they do such a thing.

That wasn’t Biden’s “Zero Tolerance” policy.

What his policy did was lead to licenses being revoked for things like abbreviating a county instead of spelling it out, or misunderstanding when the 72-hour waiting period for a NICS check properly starts.

So, with either such a poor understanding of what that policy did or a propensity to outright lie to his readers, why should anyone take his expertise on suppressors seriously?

There is no reason.

Suppressors aren’t commonly used in crimes, even with them being available for 3D printing these days. They add bulk to a gun and make it harder to conceal, which most bad guys prize for various reasons. They also have a finite lifespan, which means you can only get the sound suppressed so many times before it stops.

But hey, when you’re focused on fearmongering to delusional nutjobs who are predisposed to being lied to on guns, what else can you expect?

 “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”

The New York Times just wrote a 1,400-word article about a hip new symbol that everyone seems to be wearing these days:

 

This is literally The New York Times right now:

 

Across TikTok, young Christian women have been sharing the meaning behind their own cross necklaces, saying they help cultivate a sense of belonging and connection with others.

Sage Mills, a student at the University of Oklahoma who has posted videos about her cross necklace, said that seeing women in government like Ms. Leavitt and Ms. Bondi wear their own ‘makes me feel good. It makes me feel like God is the important thing for people that are governing our world.’

I guess these gals are all radical Christian nationalists!

In recent months, pastors with Christian nationalist beliefs have been invited to the White House numerous times.

UH OH!

 

 

The Times has the history lesson for anyone confused by this strange symbol.

The cross, a symbol most associated with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, first emerged during the Roman Empire when it was an instrument of mass torture, said Robert Covolo, a theologian and associate pastor at Christ Church Sierra Madre near Los Angeles.

By the 4th century, Mr. Covolo said that Christians had begun to use the cross as an emblem of their religion. Not long after, the cross became a focal point for daily jewelry. Cross jewelry dating as far back as the 5th century is prevalent in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Think about it: A 1,500 word article … in what used to be the most prominent newspaper in the world … explaining the cross to an American audience.

 

 

 

For real! Look at how they describe women in the Trump admin like strange creatures:

Cross necklaces have, in a way, become the jewelry of choice most associated with President Trump’s second administration.

Ms. Bondi owns several cross necklaces but most often appears at official events in a diamond-set version purchased at Mavilo, a jewelry store in Tampa, Fla.

Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has frequently worn a large cross pendant at press briefings. But Ms. Leavitt is not the first press secretary to wear a cross: Kayleigh McEnany, a press secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, also wore one.

In an email, Ms. Leavitt, 27, called the cross necklace ‘the perfect accessory to any outfit,’ adding that she wears the cross ‘because it serves as a reminder of the strength that can only be found through faith.’

These conservative women … who can understand their strange ways??

 

 

What a time to be alive!

After bringing millions of unvetted migrants into the U.S., the hate-filled left screams about a few dozen white South African refugees

What’s with the left? After ushering in tens of millions of unvetted illegal migrants and defending their ‘right’ to stay with extraordinary tenacity, President Trump lets in about 50 South Africans Boers this week, victims of extreme violence, discrimination, and Hugo Chavez-style land expropriation, and already they’re having a cow.

The far-leftist South African government is hurling abuse at the refugees as they go, and unwittingly making the case that Trump was right all along to grant them that refugee status — nobody acts like they do without a guilty conscience:

If I were a South African and saw that kind of response, I’d get out as soon as I can, because they are likely to stop Boers from getting out at some point. Anything but give them equality and justice, which is the reason the people are leaving.

The New York Times was particularly appalling in its coverage:

The first plane carrying white South Africans who received refugee status from the Trump administration landed at Washington Dulles International Airport on Monday morning, according to a flight tracking website.

The arrival marks a drastic reversal in the United States’ refugee policies, which have long focused on helping people fleeing war, famine and genocide. President Trump essentially halted all refugee admissions programs on his first day in office before creating a pathway for Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, to resettle in the United States.

The group that arrived Monday on a U.S.-funded Omni Air International charter flight say they have been discriminated against, denied job opportunities and have been subject to violence because of their race. Forty-nine Afrikaners boarded the flight on Sunday, according to a spokesman for South Africa’s airport authority, after more than 8,000 people expressed interest in the program. There are scant details available about the individuals who arrived in the United States.

The South Africans who reached the United States on Monday had received expedited processing by the Trump administration — waiting no more than three months.

What ‘reversal’? Getting macheted, necklaced, and robbed of all one’s possessions solely because of one’s race comes pretty close to genocide, and in any case, fits U.S. refugee criteria.

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BBC Pushes Firearm Falsehoods, Then Quietly Changes Article

A BBC article published on Monday, in the wake of recent mass shootings, included a graphic that contained blatant lies about the fire rates of different types of firearms.

BBC later removed the graphic from the article, but they provided no editor’s note in the article and failed to announce the correction on Twitter.

The graphic, conducted by “BBC research,” claimed that a “modified semi-automatic assault rifle (AR-15)” could fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute. This ludicrous assertion was even more astonishing when they claimed that an M16 had a maximum fire rate of 950 rounds per minute, and that a semi-automatic AK-47 only fired a mere 120 rounds per minute.

 

 

A PolitiFact fact check debunked a similar claim in 2016 after the Orlando shooting when Democrat Alan Grayson said an AR-15 could fire 700 rounds per minute. PolitiFact found that “the 700-round-a-minute figure is only a theoretical benchmark, not something achievable in reality.” This is because the cyclic fire rate of these guns is around 700.

Essentially, they found that, in a perfect world with infinite capacity magazines and without the gun overheating, that a 700-900 rounds a minute fire rate would be possible. This isn’t reality, and the BBC is trying to push that figure into the stratosphere.

The BBC researchers may have missed the mark by a monumental amount on the AR-15, but they gave a much more realistic, but still implausible, figure for a semi-automatic AK-47 with 120 rounds a minute. So, why lie about the AR-15? Who fact checked this research and who were the researchers they even employed in the first place? This is at best lazy and incompetent journalism, and at worst a malicious attempt to misinform the populace about the capability of firearms.

The article has a number of further oddities in it, citing odd figures for the prices of firearms, as well as claiming that the NRA is one of “the most powerful special interest lobby groups in the US” despite their lobbying efforts being dwarfed by organizations like Planned Parenthood.

The article may have been rife with falsehoods, obfuscation, a lack of transparency, and head-scratching statistics, but the BBC’s readers need to worry. They were sure to add a handy link to the end of the article on “why you can trust BBC News.”

The New York Times’ Latest Anti-Gun News Story

Print journalism is pretty simple, really. At least it used to be. For decades there were basically two types of stories, news and opinion. Reporters wrote news stories. Columnists and a few others wrote opinion pieces.

But in recent years we’ve seen another type of journalism rise in prominence, the anti-gun story, which masquerades as a regular news piece but is chock-full of opinion and false claims. When reporters fill their anti-gun stories with their opinions their editors do nothing, because they often share their staffer’s opinions.

During my 20 years as a newspaperman, I would call out the authors of anti-gun stories whenever I saw them, but my criticisms were usually never addressed, even though we have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Nowadays, journalists talk constantly about the accuracy of their reporting. However, when they write anti-gun stories, the normal journalism standards are gone, and the editing is a complete joke. The size of the newspaper also makes a difference. Smaller newspapers are generally more accurate when writing about guns than the big ones.

Case in point: The New York Times.

On Monday, the Times published what is perhaps the most anti-gun news story seen in quite a while. It was written by reporter Glenn Thrush, who started at the newspaper in 2017 and claimed in his bio that his most “fulfilling assignment” was writing obituaries, which is odd. Writing about the recently departed is far from fulfilling.

Thrush’s story was titled “Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures.” The array was described as a reversal of the strict gun control rules Joe Biden ordered “to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles.”

If you look closely at Thrush’s story, you will find factual errors and anti-gun hyperbole in nearly every paragraph. For example, Thrush wrote that gun dealers stripped of the Federal Firearm Licenses by Biden’s crazy zero-tolerance policy were “found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations.”

This is far from the truth.

Biden’s insane policy stripped hundreds of gun dealers of their FFL’s solely because of extremely minor clerical errors. It is estimated to have increased the FFL revocation rate by 700 percent. Thrush never mentioned that, or that the ATF occasionally sent its poorly trained SWAT team to the gun dealers’ homes, or that the dealers were handcuffed and laying on their stomachs during their conversations with the ATF. In one case, the alleged suspect never got the chance to respond to any of the federal allegations, because ATF’s SWAT team shot and killed him in his own home before they had a chance to talk.

Thrush was not kind to Attorney General Pam Bondi or her plan to use the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights.”

Even though this task is clearly covered by federal law, Thrush claimed that Bondi was “repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.”

Bondi’s decision didn’t involve any repurposing. The federal laws that govern the Civil Rights Division are very clear, unlike Biden’s ATF rules.

The author spoke to the executive director of Giffords, who falsely claimed Trump gave his seal of approval to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.” Over the years I have met more than a few gun dealers, but no one willing to sell arms to anyone with a criminal record. That this actually made it into a New York Times story is incredibly damning.

Thrush also claimed that the ATF took “an abrupt U-turn” from the schemes of Biden and ATF’s former director to “stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.”

A flood of unregulated handguns and rifles?

Remember that the next time you fill out an ATF Form 4473.

Media Efforts To Turn Signalgate Into A Scandal Are The Surest Sign It’s Not One

There are still pieces of the “Signalgate” saga of interest — like how did the worst person in Washington end up in the chat? But what would have been a relatively minor controversy has been so excessively hyped up as an epic scandal that it’s impossible to remember why it aroused anyone in the first place.

What we know from screenshots of a Signal smartphone group chat published in The Atlantic on Monday (followed by another round of screenshots on Wednesday) is that a couple of weeks ago, high-level Trump administration officials were in the chat debating the merits of a U.S. attack on the Islamic Houthi militants in Yemen. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who is proven to make things up for the sake of defaming President Trump, said he was included in the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has confirmed as much, though he said it was accidental and he doesn’t know how Goldberg was added.

There are legitimate concerns about federal recordkeeping and handling of sensitive communications, but to the extent that the content of the chat is newsworthy, it features an interesting debate on foreign policy between Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others. What’s most consequential is a portion in which Hegseth tells the chat the times that some targets will be bombed on a specific day, without specific locations, names, or routes.

It’s debatable whether the information was classified (the administration says it wasn’t) or could have potentially endangered lives — what good is a time without a location? — but per usual, the media haven’t let enough be enough. Before publishing the full screenshots, Goldberg claimed that in the chat Waltz had identified a covert CIA agent, which wasn’t true; and he suggested that explicitly named in the chat were specific enemy targets, which was also untrue.

Then a Wall Street Journal editorial said the “real security scandal” was that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is at the center of peace negotiations in Israel and Ukraine, was on the chat while in Russia and therefore, “Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.” There’s no evidence that Witkoff’s phone was on him while he was in Russia, and the one message from him in the screenshots would have placed him back in the U.S. at the time it was sent. Witkoff has said he only had a secure device while he was in Russia.

Most irksome are subsequent news articles characterizing the chat screenshots as containing “details” and “specifics” on the military attacks, when it’s at best unclear how useful time stamps alone would be in thwarting them. It’s a pointless mind exercise anyway. The public knew nothing about the conversation or the military attack plans until days after they were executed. If that’s to Goldberg’s credit, then congratulations to him — he’s not a complete and total traitor to his country, even if he is anti-American in every other way.

That brings us to the enduring point of concern with this highly oversold story: Why did Mike Waltz have Goldberg’s contact information? What are the odds that this exact anti-Trump media figure would be selected to slip into a sensitive group chat? Waltz has offered doubtful explanations and theories, such as the possibility that Goldberg’s number was listed under the wrong name in his phone contacts or, even more dubious, that Goldberg’s contact was “sucked in” via a third party. Waltz has also said he thought Goldberg was “someone else.” Okay, who? Either Waltz never intended to include the contact belonging to Goldberg — “sucked in” — or he did but thought it was a different person. It can’t be both.

It’s possible Waltz really has no clue what took place there. Stranger things have happened. But his version of events isn’t satisfying. It’s to his benefit that it’s the one part of this whole episode receiving the least amount of attention from the people keeping the story alive.

And they wonder why no one trusts them anymore.

Once upon a time, people trusted the media. When someone was questioned about where they got some fact, just responding, “I heard it on the news,” was enough to silence criticism.

In fact, distrust of the media was something used in fiction to show that an individual was a little unhinged; if not a lot unhinged.

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I’m not saying the media was more trustworthy, mind you, only that they had that trust.

They don’t anymore. More and more people distrust the mainstream media, and the media seems to be at a loss for why. At least, I’d imagine they would be since they don’t seem to be addressing the problem, even as their viewership/readership plummets.

New media outlets tend to get a lot more traffic and have a lot more trust, but the mainstream media can’t understand why. For them, it’s something insidious and not the result of their own failures.

It started ages ago, but it ramped up during Trump’s first term when they decided it was their duty to make sure Trump was a one-term president. They stopped even pretending, and it just got worse.

This week, we had a couple of grand examples of it.

Let’s start with this one.

Image

Now, that looks pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Tulsi Gabbard saying Trump and Putin are tight is kind of unambiguous.

Except, it’s BS. The AP got called on it, and then posted this:

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That’s right. Gabbard wasn’t talking about Putin but Modi. They hoped they could get away with it, but they didn’t.

The story is now gone in that way, but the internet is forever.

But, in fairness, it’s not just the mainstream media that’s the problem. Even their new media allies engage in this, too.

The Daily Beast ran this on Monday:

The story comes from an upcoming book, apparently, which means legacy media at work, with The Daily Beast ginning up interest in it.

Now, we know that Trump has played fast and loose with marriage vows in the past, so this certainly sounds plausible. Except, it didn’t happen.

Well, it did, but not like they’re spinning it.

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 The Great Unraveling.

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collections of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.

And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

It may very well turn out that we all were – just as it has turned out that USAID grants went out to support practically every cause beloved by progressives nationally and world-wide. To non-governmental organizations playing hopscotch with international migrants. To champion the causes of LGBTWXYZLOL-whatever, around the world in our own back yard and in our elementary schools. To progressive media voices, like the BBC. What the ever-loving H-E-double hockey sticks? Don’t those smooth-talking euro-snob Jew-haters get enough moola from their own government, they have to vacuum up from us as well, like a coke addict snorting a line as long as the US-Canada border?

And while I’m on the topic of our very own dear media, what about the ongoing slaughter of careers and the driving rain of pink slips falling at CBS and NBC? Joy Reid, Lester Holt and other expensive performers are being pried out of their comfortable sinecures. Personalities whom I have never particularly followed and only hear about when they have been spectacularly stupid on camera and the conservative blogosphere takes notice. I imagine their superiors pried them loose, like a dentist with an impacted molar – but why now?

Is it because top management at the various media enterprises have suddenly realized with the election of Trump that a large chunk of the public ignores them – and they have not anything like the power that they thought they had? Have they figured out that advertising on their programs was money wasted, and business sponsors know it? This is a new world for our national establishment media organs, where CBS Sixty Minutes counts for naught, and a podcaster like Joe Rogan may have put Trump and Vance over the top with an important segment of the voting public through doing searching, free-form long-format interviews.

Or could it be that laundered government funds were holding up our own media, at least as much as paid advertising? Now that such funds are being short-stopped – is that another reason for the collapsing of our media’s house of cards, now that the gravy train has come to a halt?

The AP’s feelings get hurt; it’s a First Amendment crisis!

The Associated Press (AP) makes its money selling stories to other media outlets. It pays “stringers”—reporters and photographers—around the world to submit stories, which it makes available to its subscriber outlets who can’t afford to send reporters and photographers around the globe.

That’s a good thing for smaller media outlets like local new stations, but it’s also a very bad thing because then the AP makes mistakes, or goes woke, so do its subscribers who have no way of knowing they’re making those mistakes. They do know they’re going woke, but even if they’d rather not, their choice is to play along or drop the AP feed. A good example of the AP’s wokeness and anti-Americanism is this:

Shira Bibas’ sons “died in captivity.” An honest and accurate account would say Bibas and her boys, 4 and 10 months, were savagely strangled by Hamas terrorists, and their bodies were clumsily mutilated so Hamas could claim they died in an Israeli airstrike, a perversely stupid and easily exposed lie.

The AP also uses its style guide to enforce wokeness and media outlets, including the majors, happily go along. It’s an enviable perch atop the media hierarchy and the AP has become used to certain perks, among them, a prominent chair in the White House Press Room.

Until, that is, the AP decided to keep calling the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, surely with the permission of President Trump, banished them, also from Air Force One and other places and events. This is also surely a part of Leavitt’s reshuffling the Press Room deck, booting established outlets replacing them with new media.to give new media a chance.

The horror.

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Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently.
The network had a true banner weekend.

JD Vance spoke over the weekend at the Munich security conference on behalf of the United States — the primary topic was Ukraine, for obvious reasons — but instead of discussing the immediate geopolitical matter, he took his time at the rostrum to deliver a harsh message to the European grandees gathered there about the enemy “within.” And he wasn’t subtle in identifying that threat as the overreaction of Europeans to dissident populist parties:

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy.

But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. . . .

Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

You may be outraged or shocked to see Vance speaking so bluntly to our European allies, but I, for one, am not. I wrote about the canceled Romanian elections last December with shocked disbelief at the casual annulment of democracy on the flimsiest of pretexts — and in truth, merely for going unexpectedly wrong for the establishment party in power — by people who constantly scream about “democracy.” Near as I can tell, NR was one of just five serious outlets in all of American political media to even bother with a commentary about what was otherwise a completely ignored and blandly reported travesty of democracy. (“Nothing to see here, move along.” And always, the paper-thin excuse: “Why are you complaining? You don’t want the Russians to win, do you?” No, but I don’t like being transparently condescended to, either.)

My only disagreement with Vance is that I suspect he is either making an intellectual category error or — more disingenuously but intelligently — arguing like a Straussian, subtly undermining his nominal point to demonstrate the hypocrisy of everyone he’s speaking to in the audience.

Let me explain rather simply: The Europeans do not believe in “free speech” in the same way Americans do, and never really have. Anyone who has spent even a moment’s worth of study on the differences between Continental, British, and American speech laws — and how they have historically evolved — knows that Europe as a whole knows no legally defined conception of true freedom of speech and that England once had it but, without a written constitution to turn tradition into fundamental law, has seen it eroded in recent decades.

Only in the United States, with its First Amendment, are such principles codified — and foregrounded — in a way that has not only shaped our culture from its earliest days but preserved that untamable expressive freedom that is most essentially American within us. (I say for the better; Nina Jankowicz would argue for the worse.)

Vance’s entire speech is 20 minutes long and worth reading in full — he is the Trump administration’s most effective advocate by far — but allow me one further excerpt from what must have landed in the room like a rhetorical punch in the face. (You rarely see this sort of schoolmasterly rhetoric deployed by United States diplomacy to properly scold Europe — it is usually instead deployed by Europeans to lecture us.)

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges.

But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

No wonder the Germans were weeping by the end of it all. Vance had called everybody in the audience on their bluff. “You’re not afraid of your own people, are you?” Of course they are. (And also, let’s not kid ourselves, either: They have their reasons, especially if they’re Germans.)

You know who also is terrified of the people? CBS News. Yes, CBS had a true banner Sunday for itself this weekend by tagging along with Vance to Munich. And they made it clear they were on the side of the Europeans weeping about having to listen to the angry voices of their constituents.

Margaret Brennan made headlines pontificating about the origins of the Holocaust from too much “free speech” — a topic for tomorrow’s Carnival of Fools because few in the media have more willingly donned clown makeup in recent weeks — but really it was 60 Minutes’ remarkable praise of Germany’s anti-free-speech laws that took the cake for me.

Now, 60 Minutes has had a pretty rough go of it lately, to be fair. I don’t think Donald Trump has a leg to stand on in his lawsuit against them (for editing a Kamala Harris interview), and I refuse to dignify the matter with serious comment — everything I said about that was already said when I discussed his equally repulsive “revenge lawsuit” against Ann Selzer.

But watching 60 Minutes’ hosts nod sympathetically along with German state prosecutors and investigators as they calmly explained that every random racist internet insult in their country was a prosecutable crime was both mildly horrifying — they presented this to America as a preferable alternative — and perfectly explanatory as to their current position at the bottom-most tier of American public respect: They fear us and think we, as citizens, deserve to be informationally “managed.” Why shouldn’t we hold them in equal contempt? They’re as post-democratic in their impulses as Elon Musk, the man they hate, who happily avers they should be sent to prison. Musk, whatever his other qualities, is clearly a megalomaniac with zero respect for anything except the gratification of his own impulses. CBS theoretically aspires to something more.

Op-Ed Reveals Just How Little Most Gun Control Advocates Understand Guns

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson rattled more than a few cages. There are reports of CEOs traveling with armed security, though I haven’t seen corroboration of those, and we’ve seen just how many people are OK with murdering someone simply because they don’t like them.

And in the media, it’s been a great time to push all the evils of so-called “ghost guns” since it turns out the alleged killer had one in his possession.

The problem is that a great many of those in the media who are beating the drum really don’t know what they’re talking about.

Just in time for Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and the winter solstice and New Year’s, Republicans and Democrats find themselves face-to-face with a problem they can actually solve together.

They can outlaw so-called “ghost guns” like the one used to kill a health care executive recently in New York City.

Imagine that. A genuine end-of-the-year opportunity to do something for the common good — something that transcends cultures and religions and politics.

Yes, dear reader, I know what you are thinking: Our nation’s political system is so broken that Republicans and Democrats barely speak to each other. So actually solving a problem — well, that may take a miracle.

But this is a season of hope, right?

Ghost guns are virtually untraceable. They can be made at home, from plastic-like materials on a 3D printer. They look like toys. And prospective shooters can even pick a favorite color, with choices ranging from tennis ball green to Barbie pink.

But these guns are definitely not toys. And we all know what ghost guns can do. We saw one in action on the morning of Dec. 4, when a hooded, masked man stepped from the predawn shadows on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and killed a health care executive with a shot in the back.

First, let’s talk about gun tracing, since that seems to be the main condemnation of these homemade firearms.

There’s no evidence that gun tracing has ever been used to solve a crime. People have specifically looked, and while there might be an exception they missed, it’s clearly not an essential tool for law enforcement, especially since there’s no way it would be enough to secure a conviction in and of itself.

Second, let’s get into the “they look like toys” argument, which is a new one for me. I guess I should be thankful for that because a new argument means that I get to take a different, novel approach in response. I generally like that.

However, this one is too idiotic to actually enjoy rebutting.

They look like toys? Where the hell is he looking at homemade guns? Yeah, they’re plastic–polymer, actually, but who am I to quibble?–but the gun that the alleged killer had on hand was one that basically looked like a Glock, the most popular handgun model in the country. Toys generally are made to look like real guns anyway, so that’s a nonsense argument even if it were true.

The reason there’s no outrage over “ghost guns” is that the people who are outraged over the murder are the people who support gun rights, as a general thing. That’s it. That’s why there’s “no outrage” over Thompson’s murder. The people who want to be outraged over guns are too busy celebrating a murder, which just goes to show it’s not about the guns, it’s about people like you and me having them.

Saudi Suspect Plows Car Into German Christmas Market; U.S. Media Blames [Checks Notes] the Car

An attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, has left at least two people dead and 60-80 injured. According to Die Welt:

A driver drove into a group of people at the Christmas market in Magdeburg. Government spokesman Matthias Schuppe confirmed to WELT that it was an attack. City spokesman Michael Reif also said that the initial report was an “attack on the Christmas market”. The suspected perpetrator is in police custody. WELT learned from security sources that he is a man from Saudi Arabia who was born in 1974.

The Saudi national, who had reportedly been in Germany illegally since 2006, allegedly rented a car and headed to the market two hours west of Berlin, which was teeming with visitors enjoying the Christmas festivities. A suitcase was found on the passenger seat of the vehicle, according to Die Welt, and authorities are currently trying to ascertain whether it contains an explosive device. The terrorist was taken into custody, and it’s not known whether he acted alone.

A police spokesman said the suspect drove “at least 400 meters across the Christmas market.” A witness said the attack occurred in the market’s fairy tale section.

Police have secured the area and are asking people to avoid the city center.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, “My thoughts are with the victims and their families. We stand by their side and by the side of the people of Magdeburg. My thanks go to the dedicated rescue workers in these anxious hours.”

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently called for vigilance at Christmas markets. “Federal security authorities do not currently have any concrete indications of danger,” she told reporters. “But in view of the high threat situation at an abstract level we still have reason to be very vigilant and to take effective action for our security.”

Deutsche Welle reported in November on Germany’s new knife ban:

the German government passed new security legislation in October in response to a deadly knife attack in the western city of Solingen in August. The suspected Islamist attacker killed three people and injured eight more.

The new security package tightened rules on the carrying of weapons in public spaces in Germany and explicitly banned the carrying of knives at festivals, sporting events, markets, fairs and other large events.

“The police will be present in many locations to ensure security,” said Faeser.

The attack in Magdeburg comes eight years, almost to the day after Muslim extremist Anis Amri hijacked a truck and plowed into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and wounding 56 others. According to the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, Amri was in Germany illegally and was well known to authorities both for his radicalism and his crime sprees:

When Amri entered the European Union on April 4, 2011, via the Italian island of Lampedusa, he claimed to be 16 years old. After his arrival, he was placed in a refugee shelter for minors in Belpasso, Sicily. The Italian authorities asked Tunisia for travel documents in order to return Amri to his home country, but the request went unanswered. In October 2011, Amri and four other Tunisian refugees attacked a staff member at the shelter and started a fire. Amri was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. It was during his incarceration in different Italian jails that Amri became radicalized. A report for the Italian Committee for Strategic Anti-Terrorism Analysis (CASA) stated that Amri was considered a “dangerous person” and a “leader of the Islamists in prison” and that he was “transferred due to severe security concerns.” Amri had threatened and attacked staff and reportedly threatened to decapitate a Christian inmate.

On June 17, 2015, Italy was legally required to release Amri from a deportation facility because Tunisian authorities had not responded to its request to send travel documents for him.  After his release, Amri traveled to Switzerland, where he stayed for around two weeks before traveling to Germany. In early July 2015, German police in the city of Freiburg, near the Swiss border, registered Amri for “unlawful entry” under the name Anis Amir and took his fingerprints and photo. [Emphasis added]

U.S. media outlets were quick to blame the car for today’s attack:

The Clock Strikes Thirteen
And the Establishment gets washed away by a preference cascade. But it was a damn close-run thing.

What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?

There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.

In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.

But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.

This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.

In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.

This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.

In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.

But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.

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